2 1/4 years since last NYC show proper. Well pleased to be getting there. If it approaches his last October 1 NYC show five years ago, WE COULD HAVE A FANTASTIC NIGHT. See you all under the marquee at 7:00 or so, as the Town Hall NEVER opens the doors until 7:30. Enjoy friends!!!

bronxapostle wrote:2 1/4 years since last NYC show proper. Well pleased to be getting there. If it approaches his last October 1 NYC show five years ago, WE COULD HAVE A FANTASTIC NIGHT. See you all under the marquee at 7:00 or so, as the Town Hall NEVER opens the doors until 7:30. Enjoy friends!!!

Elvis Costello, who has a solo show at Town Hall on Oct. 1, plays with his band the Imposters at the Beacon Theater on Nov. 6 and 7. Credit Geordie Wood for The New York Times

Elvis Costello’s New York Soul

By WENDELL JAMIESON

SEPT. 28, 2016

Elvis Costello first saw Manhattan when he was 23. This was late 1977. He and his band, the Attractions, were coming down from New Haven on their first tour of the United States when the skyscrapers came into view.

“It was really like a jolt of adrenaline — it’s such a mythic skyline,” he said. “I’d only experienced that a few other times in my career. Another was when I first saw Shanghai: You feel like you’d been shot out of a rocket to another planet.”

Now he’s in his early 60s and sitting in a booth in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel on West 43rd Street, seeming quite at home. He knows a bit about the place, too. He laments that the Oak Room, the cabaret where his wife, Diana Krall, had once performed, is gone and jokingly wonders whether Dorothy Parker could have afforded one of the suites that now bear her name ($424 a night).

Mr. Costello was in New York for a few days after playing the Newport Jazz Festival in July. He’ll be back for three shows this fall — one Oct. 1 at Town Hall featuring his solo DeTour show, in which he ranges around his catalog, and the others on Nov. 6 and 7 at the Beacon Theater with his band the Imposters, focusing on his 1982 album, “Imperial Bedroom.”

Elvis and New York. The two have shared a long and deepening history since that first skyline jolt. There have been famous concerts and a legendary television appearance and recordings that included a late-career masterpiece. He marked his 50th birthday with concerts at Lincoln Center; his 60th with a show at Carnegie Hall; and the release of his 2013 album with the Roots, “Wise up Ghost,” with a performance at Brooklyn Bowl. He was in the city just after Sept. 11 and remembers how kind everyone was toward one another in those days.

In all, he has made 278 appearances in New York City. I was at roughly 25 of his shows, mostly as a deeply obsessed teenager, but at quite a few as an adult, too, and now I was sitting in that booth in the Algonquin pestering him about a longstanding theory of mine: that there is something in his music — caustic, smart, fast-talking, but with moments of deep compassion and sublime beauty — that is quintessentially New York. He made a habit early in his career of being in-your-face, maybe a bit of a jerk, characteristics some might associate with New Yorkers as well.

Mr. Costello at the Algonquin Hotel in Times Square. Credit Geordie Wood for The New York Times

Never mind that he grew up in Liverpool and London and has lived in Dublin and now Vancouver, British Columbia. How else but with shared attitudes could a 13-year-old from Brooklyn latch on to a singer-songwriter-performer who peppers his lyrics with Britishisms (Vauxhall Viva, tuppenny ha’penny millionaire)?

The moment you meet a lifelong idol is transporting. Dressed in a blue suit jacket with small white polka dots, relaxed and enjoying the coolness of the lobby on a scorching hot day, Mr. Costello was game to knock around my theory, if at first not entirely convinced. We were both hard-pressed to come up with other examples of non-New Yorker musicians, artists or authors who conveyed the sense of the city without trying to, or even realizing they were.

As the conversation moved along, a rich stream of New Yorkiness did indeed reveal itself, both in Mr. Costello’s music and in his experiences, whether captured in song or his autobiography, “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” (Blue Rider Press, 2015; out Oct. 11 in paperback). It even reached back to before he was born.

Mr. Costello made the first comparison to someone else famous — a transplanted New Yorker and a lifelong idol of his.

“John Lennon came to live here and volunteered the idea that he saw some equivalency between New York and Liverpool,” he said. “In a way, it was a heightened version, being a port. I felt at home the first time I came here.”

He was quickly on a roll.

“I didn’t drive a car until I was 38, so I liked any town you could walk around, and I never ever felt threatened. Maybe that was naïve of me, or maybe I didn’t venture far enough afield. People were generally not bothered by you. Why would they be bothered by you? It wasn’t as if I was wearing a gold suit.”

The young Mr. Costello had a firm handle on all the music scenes in the United States when he first arrived, and hungered to experience them. But he found many had faded; the only scene that really felt alive and happening was New York.

“I went to New Orleans, and there were little bits of music here and there, but I didn’t know enough to get to the right or wrong side of town,” he said, “whereas in New York you could actually walk into places, and it was actually happening.”

This was the age of Blondie and Talking Heads, bands he would get to know and with whom he would share bills. He played with Richard Hell and the Voidoids at CBGB and remembers wandering around Alphabet City, carrying a 1961 Fender Stratocaster he’d just bought on West 48th Street, looking for Mr. Hell’s apartment.

On the last day of that tour, Mr. Costello and the Attractions went to 30 Rockefeller Plaza to appear on “Saturday Night Live,” famously cutting off one song (“Less Than Zero”) to blast into another (“Radio Radio”). The change apparently messed up the show’s timing, and legend has it that Mr. Costello was told he’d never work in television again. Not quite. He made it back to “S.N.L.” for the show’s 25th and 40th anniversaries, at one point reprising the infamous song-switch with the Beastie Boys.

He toured furiously in the late ’70s and early ’80s, appearing at, among other places, the Bottom Line, Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, Radio City Music Hall, Avery Fisher Hall, Pier 84 on the Hudson River and, perhaps most often, the Palladium on 14th Street, which he called “our regular address in those days.”

It was there during an epic show on New Year’s Eve 1981-82 that he debuted many songs on “Imperial Bedroom,” his lavish, at times abstract but often soaring album that would be released the following summer, and which will be the focus of this November’s shows.

I was up — way, way up — in the balcony that night. I will never forget the thrill of the Attractions’ drummer, Pete Thomas, opening the show with the machine-gun intro of “Lipstick Vogue” in complete darkness. The band played for nearly three hours. Six months later, I bought “Imperial Bedroom” the day it came out at Record Factory on West Eighth Street in Manhattan (it took an extra day or two for records to reach Brooklyn). Unable to stand the suspense, I opened the sleeve to stare at the disc while riding on the subway, as if the melodies would somehow reveal themselves to my eyes.

Mr. Costello, amused if mildly alarmed by my subway story, calls “Imperial Bedroom” the last “collaborative” record he made with the Attractions; from then on, either he or a producer called the shots. And indeed, he and the band slowed their frantic pace in the mid-’80s. This allowed for some real vacations and one memorable scene in “Unfaithful Music & Disappearing Ink” in which he and his father, Ross MacManus, himself a singer and trumpet player, took a long walk around Manhattan. You can feel the city coming into sharper focus.

“It was the first holiday we had taken together since I was 7,” he wrote. “We walked all over Manhattan during those five days, from Park Avenue to Hell’s Kitchen, where my papa had lodged in the 1920s.” That night, he and his dad went to see Peggy Lee in Chelsea.

“My papa” was his grandfather, Pat MacManus, who makes a brief appearance on Mr. Costello’s 1986 album “King of America” — Mr. Costello sings how “my grandfather before me walked the streets of New York.”

Pat MacManus was a trumpet player aboard trans-Atlantic ocean liners. He used to regale his family with tales of rough New York. Not too long ago, after his father died, Mr. Costello examined an old photo album kept by his grandfather.

“It was a tiny little photo album with tiny little pictures,” said Mr. Costello, who was born Declan MacManus. “I had them scanned and blew them up, and they were a travelogue of New York. Pictures of Times Square — just over here — a guy crossing the road, cars going by. He just snapped it. And there are pictures of him lying in the grass in Central Park. And in Coney Island.”

Throughout the 1990s, Mr. Costello came to New York almost as regularly as his grandfather before him, often stopping to perform on “Late Show With David Letterman” at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway. But when, in 2001, he came to record horns for “When I Was Cruel,” a guitar-driven return to his youthful, aggressive past, he landed in a different city. It was mid-September: New York was still stunned by Sept. 11. “I flew in over the city and was here to experience something of that odd mood — nobody was angry with anybody, and there was just this heaviness of it all.”

In late 2002, he began to compose a ballad called “I’m in the Mood Again.” Now New York was more than just a single line; it was the whole song.

Hail to the taxis They go where I goFarewell the newspapers that know more than I know Flung under a streetlamp still burning at dawnI’m in the mood again

The song closes “North,” which came out in 2003, and which to me is Mr. Costello’s New York Album. He creased his forehead and nodded. “Yeah, I suppose it is."

And it’s not just that song. Spare and sung in a register set so deliberately low that it forces Mr. Costello to nearly speak the lines, “North” paints images in my mind of autumnal city streets, mottled leaves on the pavement, lit only by the amber windows of a corner bar with an empty stool or two.

It was recorded at Avatar Studios on West 53rd Street and chronicles the dissolution of Mr. Costello’s second marriage (to the former Pogues member Cait O’Riordan), and the beginning of his romance with Ms. Krall — we imagine she’s the “marvelous girl covered up in my coat” in the song “Still.” The somber tone of much of the album contrasts with what sounds like a pretty joyful — and glitteringly Manhattan — experience making it.

“We were living in this kind of Fred-and-Ginger fantasy in the Carlyle Hotel,” he said of himself and Ms. Krall, by now married. “My wife and I were living in the most fantastic suite.”

Mr. Costello becomes somber himself when he discusses the current state of the music industry, and how he’s gotten off “the machine” of recording an album every year or two followed by tours. Now he focuses on shows, though he’s still prolific — he is currently writing songs for a musical of the 1957 Elia Kazan film, “A Face in the Crowd.”

Now he’s turning his attention to the shows focused on “Imperial Bedroom.” At the time, it was a departure: He and the Attractions stretched out in all directions, adding layers of instrumentation and even orchestral parts. Geoff Emerick, who had engineered numerous Beatles recordings, helped Mr. Costello take the songs apart in the studio and put them back together; a few have never been played live.

The Imposters are two-thirds of the Attractions — Mr. Thomas and the keyboardist Steve Nieve — and Davey Farragher, who replaced Bruce Thomas (no relation to Pete) on bass. Yet for all intents and purposes, they are a different band — more groove-based and, like all of us, a bit older. Mr. Costello says the record won’t be played in order, but beyond that he is still working out what the audience will hear.

“Do we return it to the raw version of the song, where we just blasted through it for the first time?” he asked. “Do we want the refinement of the record arrangement? Do we want to rewrite? What else did I leave out of the songs that I maybe need to say now?”

He finished a cappuccino. “Like that — we will take this music and just make it happen.”

Times Insider delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how news, features and opinion come together at The New York Times. In this piece, Wendell Jamieson, the editor of the Metro section, shares his experience at the Algonquin Hotel with his idol, the musician Elvis Costello.

I didn’t tell him about the time my dad pulled our Honda alongside his limousine on the West Side Highway and how, as both cars idled at a red light, I reached through the open window, across the broken white line, and shook his hand.

I didn’t tell him about how I put on a jacket and went to the lobby of the Parker Meridian hotel with a friend and ordered drinks — we were 18; the drinking age was 19 — in the hopes we might meet him. (It was expensive.)

I didn’t tell him about the time I actually met him, backstage at the Forest Hills tennis stadium in 1984, when another friend — this one a gorgeous redheaded girl — found the tent where the band was hanging out. The bouncers parted as if by magic, the rest of us fell in step behind her and we all chatted amiably with him for at least 15 minutes.

I didn’t tell him how, when my mother and sister were away in the summer, I would stay up all night in our house in Brooklyn playing along with his records — first on chairs positioned like a drum-set (badly), then on piano (badly), then on bass guitar (maybe not so badly).

But I did tell Elvis Costello about the July afternoon in 1982 when I bought his album “Imperial Bedroom” at Record Factory on 8th street in Greenwich Village. It took a few days for new releases to make it to my local record store, Soundtracks on 7th Avenue in Park Slope, so I went in to Manhattan, but this meant an excruciating wait on the subway ride home. I opened the sleeve. For the first time on an Elvis Costello album, lyrics were printed, though in all caps with no paragraphs, no breaks and no punctuation. I pored over them but that wasn’t enough. So I slid out the disc itself and stared at it, as if the grooves would release the melodies to my eyes.

He laughed at this one, and looked only slightly worried. After all, he knew what it was to be a fan — he was a member of the Beatles fan club when he was growing up. And he’s used to fans who are obsessed with his music; he’s never been a huge star in the United States, but he’s always had a deeply devoted following. What his most loyal listeners lack in numbers they make up for in intensity.

We were chatting in a booth in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in July for a story I planned to write for Arts & Leisure about a long-held theory of mine: that though Mr. Costello grew up in Liverpool and London and has lived in Dublin and now Canada, his music has a certain New York sensibility — sharp, honest, to-the-point, but with beauty and affection below the surface. And I wanted to get to the bottom of his New York story: The city has appeared at important moments in his life and in his music.

Relaxed and funny, alternately sipping cappuccino and sparkling water, our conversation dipping serendipitously in and out of different phases of his career, he was intrigued by my theory, though, as I say in my story, not initially convinced. He warmed up to the idea, however, as our allotted 45-minutes stretched to nearly two hours, and additional bottles of sparkling water arrived at our table. Maybe he was just pleased to undergo a line of questioning he’d never encountered before. Or maybe it was so hot outside that he didn’t want to leave the hotel.

But I had a bigger reason to be there than the story. I was meeting a lifelong hero.

Why, as a 13-year-old from Brooklyn, did I pick Elvis Costello as my guy and never look back? I’ve seen him perform maybe 30 times — a lot, but nothing compared to other fans. My girlfriend in 10th grade got us sixth-row tickets to see him after “Imperial Bedroom” came out (he and his killer band, The Attractions, opened with “Accidents Will Happen”); my girlfriend senior year took me to see him at Stony Brook University on Long Island (the first time I saw him perform solo), and my girlfriend in my early 20s somehow managed to get a copy of his album, “Mighty Like a Rose,” one week early. (We’ve been married 22 years and have two children.)

Did Mr. Costello’s youthful irritation at authority, his simultaneous affection for and fear of girls and women, his obvious fascination with history and politics, make me feel a certain kinship with him? Did his wordplay tickle my brain and make me want to untangle more riddles? Did his harassed characters and dark narratives make me want to listen in the way that one glances, guiltily, at a couple arguing on the sidewalk? Did his melodies and band’s playing send my spirit soaring? Who knows? I heard his music and I was gone.

I’m the Metro editor of The New York Times. I’ve dined with mayors and governors and police commissioners — been chewed out by them, too — and met plenty of actors, authors and musicians. Now I’m 50, and I thought: Maybe it’s time to get together with Elvis again. Maybe he has all the answers. I pitched his people, and they went for it. I knew I wouldn’t gush or make a fool of myself, but I also knew that it was important for him to know that I was a fan and that the story I planned to write was going to include my fandom.

My first thought when I saw him walk into the lobby was that Elvis Costello still looks remarkably like Elvis Costello — black-rimmed glasses, hairline, suit jacket, jaunty in a slightly jumbled way. My second thought when we sat down was that there would be no lulls in this interview: Elvis has a lot to say. We got rolling and were soon discussing various memories from nights we had shared, like New Year’s Eve 1981 at the Palladium on 14th Street in Manhattan. He was on stage in a bow tie with The Attractions for nearly three hours that night; I was way, way, way up in the balcony with a group of friends for whom the ticket price — $19.82 — had nearly broken our collective banks.

As the conversation moved along, it became painfully clear that I was in the presence of someone far more intelligent than myself, and someone whose knowledge of music of all kinds is as complete as my knowledge of Elvis Costello’s music. He’s a born conversationalist, self-effacing and not afraid of eye contact, and as unfailingly charming as he was that night backstage in Forest Hills, even without the gorgeous redhead. Unlike many people I’ve met as a writer, he seemed interested in the life of his interviewer. He even disagreed with me several times — like when I said that being in a band was like being in a marriage: “No, I can tell you it’s nothing like being in a marriage.” I took the disagreements as a sign of respect: I mean, why bother setting me straight if he thinks I’m a moron?

At one point, we paused to look at our phones — in his case “to check on the lads.” (He has two sons, Dexter and Frank, with his wife, the singer and jazz pianist Diana Krall.)

Alas, he couldn’t tell me why his music touched me so. But he seemed to think the answer wasn’t very important. Music, he said, is not something you should think about too much. Maybe you should just feel it.

Only at the end of the interview, all my New York questions asked, my job done, did it begin to dawn on me: You are sitting in a booth with Elvis Costello. This man sitting right here talking to you — wait, what did he just say? — is Elvis Costello. My mind wandered — focus, focus. The 15-year-old boy inside me, hair greasy and spiky, bashing on chairs along with “Get Happy!!”, struggled to get out. But I kept it together. My only star-struck moment was when he ordered a cappuccino with no cinnamon, and I said a bit too enthusiastically, “I’ll have what he’s having!” — even though I like cinnamon on my cappuccino.

His handler came along and said they had to go take photographs. We shook hands and I told him, truthfully, that it had been an honor, and I thanked him for all the joy he’d given me over these last three-and-a-half decades. He said I was welcome.

So what’s it like to meet the focus of such lifelong fascination? Deeply rewarding when that person appreciates your interest, is friendly and fully engaged, and is perhaps at a moment in life, like you , when he is looking back over the decades with a certain sense of satisfaction, and looking forward wondering — o.k., I’ve got a bunch of things I still need to do: What’s next, and how are the lads?

It’s a bonus when you manage not to make a fool of yourself (at least I think I didn’t). Maybe I should have suggested we have our picture taken in that booth. But I decided not to. I mean, I’m a pro. I didn’t want him to think I was obsessed or anything.

I know I heard it at a soundcheck at the Pier NYC, I would have thought 1983, but I imagine 1982 makes more sense. AND I THINK I EVEN HAVE A RECORDING OF IT THAT I ACQUIRED FROM THE GREAT TONY S. I will check into it one of these days.

Wendell Jamieson - They got half way through it ( A Boy With A Problem ) during a soundcheck at Pier 84 in '82. They started it a few times and kept giving up in the middle, if I remember. No way to see if EC or members of the band were displeased. I thought we'd hear it that night but no such luck.EC told me several of the songs had never been performed live. Perhaps he forgot. And I forgot a crucial journalism maxim: if your mother says she loves you, check it out!He also said he first saw NYC while coming from Philly, but a check of your site showed it was New Haven. His folks confirmed. In fact, there was so much more I wanted to add but couldn't fit. A whole passage about "Wise up Ghost" had to go for space. It would have given you and your group whole new arenas to try and find my mistakes!

E - Post the deleted parts here!

Wendell Jamieson - I think that's against the rules! Generally, he compared WUG to IB, saying they were both very much products of the studio, and that the songs morphed in surprising ways when played live. He said the debut at Brooklyn Bowl was the first time he'd played with all the Roots. He said it was one of the single best performances in which he was ever involved.

E - Against the rules? Bummer. I thought only cubicle monkeys like me didn't own their "work product".

Wendell Jamieson - Not rules, per se... But if I trimmed something out of a reporter's story and he or she pubbed it elsewhere, I might be cross. But you get the gist.

After I shared the 'Problem recording -

Wendell Jamieson-

Ooooh. That's a nice performance of "Boy with a Problem." And it sounds pretty played-in, too, as if they were doing it every night. I'm curious if anyone has the New Year's Eve 1981-82 show, specifically the "Lipstick Vogue" opening, in which Pete repeated the drum intro several more times than on the record as the band members took their places in near total darkness.

Wendell also commented on the link of the feature on Elvis's f/book page. He responded to a hostile response -

Most responses have been hugely complimentary, and no one has found fault with my grammar, though I do concede a few moronic errors of fact. We are well into the hundreds of thousands of readers now, so I must have done something right. I guess we can agree to disagree on this one but agree on our shared fondness for Mr. Costello.

If the ticket says 8, I am certain LP will hit the stage promptly. What will they play...25 minutes as they play again with E. Look for him to hit the stage 8:40/50 i'd bet as I'm certain he wants to give us more than two hours by 11:00 curfew. Enjoy

bronxapostle wrote:If the ticket says 8, I am certain LP will hit the stage promptly. What will they play...25 minutes as they play again with E. Look for him to hit the stage 8:40/50 i'd bet as I'm certain he wants to give us more than two hours by 11:00 curfew. Enjoy

bronxapostle wrote:If the ticket says 8, I am certain LP will hit the stage promptly. What will they play...25 minutes as they play again with E. Look for him to hit the stage 8:40/50 i'd bet as I'm certain he wants to give us more than two hours by 11:00 curfew. Enjoy

Unbelievable show featured twelve I never saw performed before and one big rearrangement. EIWTB (BIG Sisters Clothes version) as he threw in the big bass riff throughout the rewrite. Even he himself agreed with me calling it that after the show. I hereby grant Foyle permision to share here the dreaded selfie I took with his kind approval. Such a nice guy always.